


There's A Song About This Somewhere

by fourfreedoms



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sports, Apparently I need to write a billion stories about soccer..., M/M, Pre-Slash, Soccer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-26
Updated: 2012-04-26
Packaged: 2017-11-04 08:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/392032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourfreedoms/pseuds/fourfreedoms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It doesn't matter. All he wants to do is make the team, and the rest will sort itself out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's A Song About This Somewhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [passionofmind](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=passionofmind).



The first Monday morning of the school year is painful for everyone in Nate’s house, not least because they've moved to a new school district and his sister is only just starting high school. Nate lies in his bed, staring at the godforsaken numbers on his alarm clock, contemplating if there is any sound he despises more than it’s incessant ringing and yet somehow can't make himself get out of bed to turn it off. His parents bustle back and forth in front of his door, more loudly than is necessary, probably on purpose, Nate thinks. His dad sticks his head in after a moment and blinks. 

"You’re up,” he says, brows raised. 

Nate sighs and throws an arm over his eyes. “I guess.” 

His dad laughs and pops back out again. Nate, normally a cheerful person, feels very strongly that his parents should stop pretending this is a grand adventure like a trip to Paris or a Safari in Africa. They moved away from Maryland because Nate’s mom got a better job offer, and while the whole family is trying to be happy for her, it’s one of those things where you can just hear the quotations around the word ‘adjustment.’

Nate stares up at the ceiling and decides he hates it. And the floor. And all of his clothes. And the walk to school that he made with his sister a few days ago to be sure she knew the way. But there’s nothing for it. He gets up and takes a shower. 

His dad tosses him a banana when he reaches the kitchen and his mother is busily brown-bagging a set of lunches. 

“Mom,” he protests, “you didn’t have to make my lunch. I’m almost an adult.” 

“It’s for good luck at soccer tryouts,” she says, pulling out a sharpie so she can draw a cutesie picture and a LOVE MOM in large letter’s on Eva’s bag. 

“Nate doesn’t need luck,” Eva replies, standing in front of their dad while he yanks her unruly hair back into two pigtails. 

“Luck might not hurt.” Nate smiles. “You ready to go?” He says to Julia, packing all his stuff up into a backpack and swinging his gym bag up onto his shoulder. He promised their parents he’d walk Julia to her first day of high school. But she doesn’t seem particularly interested in the idea. She’s got her feet propped up on the breakfast bar and she’s still doing her nails a glittery pink that matches her top. 

“I’m not going to be late for you,” Nate calls, leaning against the front door. 

Nate’s parents both look up at Julia and cluck. “Oh, leave it, Julia! You should’ve done that last night. Go with your brother,” his mom says. 

“I’ve only done half my hand!” Julia protests. 

“Then I guess the other kids will make fun of you for not getting up earlier,” his mother replies solemnly. 

“Mom!” Julia moans. 

Nate rolls his eyes and resigns to wait for her outside. His baby, a 1970 Plymouth Superbird he started restoring with his dad when he was twelve, sits rusting in the driveway, hemmed in on one side by his mother's Civic and from behind by his dad's Lexus. The house they moved into is ten minutes away from the school, too close for Nate to be allowed to drive. Nobody around here actually seems to use their garage for cars and in keeping with neighborhood protocol they’ve left all three lined up in the driveway.

The door swings open and closed with a slam. Julia comes out of the house with a face like a thunderclap. She punches his shoulder, streaking half-dried glittery nail polish on his arm and then shouts at him for screwing up her nail polish. 

“Give it a rest,” he says, turning around and heading off down the sidewalk. She makes a noise of disgust and after a long moment loaded with pouting he pointedly ignores, she follows.

*

The school itself isn’t so bad, although he can't help comparing it to his last one and finding it lacking. Their math program’s eighty times better than his last school, hard enough that he kind of regrets signing up for BC Calc for seniors rather than the AB program the school had advised for incoming juniors. He despairs of his English class. The teacher is fine, but English honors is mixed juniors and seniors, and the syllabus, which, he feels, should bear some resemblance to the western canon of English literature is pockmarked with odd names and the occasional Victorian snoozer. What makes sense, he’s already read, and what he hasn’t read he’s pretty sure will never serve him in life. But it's fine, Nate is capable of reading other material out of the classroom. It would just be nice to be able to avoid doing extra work so he doesn't go to college looking like a pre-verbal illiterate.

He has history just before lunch, usually his favorite class, but the teacher in history is nearly blind and reads his name off the role as Nate Fuck, and then blinks myopically when the entire class roars with laughter. Nate knows that correcting it will only feed the class’s hilarity so he says with weary acceptance, “Yeah, that’s about right.”

He’s unused to an outdoor campus with no real set lunchroom and when class lets out he spend a moment hovering in confusion, trying to figure out where to go, but Mike, one of the seniors in his English class and his Cold War elective, passes by and chucks him on the shoulder. 

"Yo, come sit with us," he says, jerking his head to a corner of the quad. 

He doesn’t seem baked or checked out, like this kid Lilley he met in history who was living like it was the Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Nate's fine for a hit occasionally, but he's serious about school and especially soccer, and he doesn't want to jeopardize that, nor does he really want to spend time with people who won't understand. 

They sit with a couple of Mike’s friends, almost all football players, in a grassy spot under a diseased live oak. 

“They’re cutting it down next year,” Mike says, looking at a withered branch. “I’ve sat here all four years, it’s kind of depressing.” 

Nate shrugs. Two months before he left, his old school had paved over one of the few remaining green areas with the unsatisfactory explanation that the students tracked too much mud into the halls in the winter when the snow started melting off. 

Nate asks about the soccer team while munching on the turkey sandwich his mother made. He doesn’t like turkey. Next time he’ll have to get up earlier to make his own lunch. 

“Oh, you trying out?” Mike asks. 

Nate nods. 

“We’re pretty good, I guess. Not as good as football,” he says with a smile. 

“Not as shit as football, you mean,” Mike’s girlfriend, Clara, replies. She leans on Mike’s shoulder. “We dropped a division last year and everybody was so excited that we were finally going to win something, but we only won one game.” 

“It’s gonna be different this year,” Mike replies. “You’ll see.” 

They’re interrupted from talking further by antics on the quad. A tall guy breaks away from a knot of students, chasing after a short skinny kid in a powder blue Team Zissou shirt who laughs uproariously. They sprint around and around the quad until the tall guy catches up to him right in front of their tree and gets him in a headlock, yanking him around bodily like he weighs barely more than Nate's gym bag. 

“Brad, what’s up?” Mike calls to the tall kid. He must be at least 6’4 and already filled out. Nate can only hope to be that broad through the chest one day. 

Brad doesn’t answer, he runs expressionless blue eyes over Nate and then turns back to Mike. Nate gets the feeling of being summarily dismissed. 

“Just Ray being a toolbox,” he says, shaking the kid in the Team Zissou shirt. 

Ray laughs and huffs at the same time, face brilliantly red. “I just told Shireen Case that Brad has severe gastro-intestinal problems when she asked me if I thought he’d go with her to the fall fair and eat funnel cake.” He chokes up with laughter again. “Her face. Oh her face.” 

“I should dump you right back into the biohazardous trashcan you crawled out of,” Brad replies, tightening his arm. He doesn't honestly seem all that bothered.

“Brad, can’t breathe, losing braincells,” Ray protests, face going almost purple. 

“I think that might be an improvement, assface,” Brad replies, turning away and marching Ray back to the quad. “Later, Mike,” he calls back over his shoulder. 

“Later,” Mike calls and shrugs at Nate.

*

Nate purposely arrives at tryouts early. He doesn't know any of the other guys, and he wants the lay of the land first. The coach is young and a little bit green, but when Nate asks for a ball out of the bag he nods and lets Nate do a lap around the field, dribbling. A couple of guys follow shortly after, talking and laughing and catching up on their summers. Other people would feel isolated, but Nate’s doesn't feel left out when he's got the ball and ground in front of him. Besides, there are a couple of people Nate knows. One from his auto shop class, a couple from AP Bio, another from US History. Nate recognizes Brad stretching his quads amid a group of seniors when he loops back around the field. 

Coach sets them to a two mile run and then to liners. Brad is fast—his long legs eating up grass. But Nate is faster. He flies up and down the field feeling with every moving muscle that this, surely, was what he was built for. When coach tells them to call it quits, he catches Brad’s eyes on him, quietly measuring. Nate holds his gaze for a moment, refusing to be intimidated if that's what this is, and then turns away. 

As the tryouts go on, a couple of really good players stand out. Nate starts cataloguing how they’ll all fit together as a unit, spotting their weakness and their strengths. Stafford and Christeson are tireless mids. Walt Hasser or Princess as the other guys call him doesn’t look like much, but he’s got a killer foot. Nate’s not worried though, he knows the minute he hooks the ball away from Eric during defensive drills and sends it sailing past Espera’s hands that he’s on the team. It was a brilliant play, and he's got forty more where that came from. 

Brad is easily the best player on the field. They unfortunately play the same position, but during drills coach rotates them both throughout the offensive line so that it doesn’t look like he’s favoring one or the other. Nate wonders if he should be competing for top spot. He’s played striker ever since he was seven and he scored three goals in his first game of AYSO. He supposes if he loses out to Brad it won’t be so bad. That rangey kid Pappy will probably be made right wing, so Nate’s going to have to work on his accuracy with his left foot if he wants to continue to play forward.

During the defensive drills things begin to sour and it quickly becomes clear the soccer talent here contains a couple of jerks. He watches in horrified resignation as this douchefuck the other guys call Encino Man slide tackles the shit out of some skinny sophomore who goes face first into the dirt. Encino Man laughs and heads off in the other direction. Nate helps the kid up. “I don’t think I’m going to make the cut,” he tells Nate dismally. 

“Just keep your head in the game and worry about it later.” 

The kid wipes his shorts off with a careless hand and shoots Nate a weak smile. “Yeah, okay.” 

Coach brings out a pile of nylon pinnies, but all the guys refuse to wear them, so coach rolls his eyes heavenward and says, “Shirts versus skins, jesus. Y’all are a bunch of whiney fucking babies.” 

Espera claps his gloves together. “And yet you love us, Coach Pat, how fucked up is that?” 

“Watch your mouth, Poke,” Coach Patterson replies, menacing him with his clipboard, “And don’t call me that.” 

Nate and Brad are assigned to the skins' side. He finds Brad watching him again as he pulls off his sweatsoaked jersey. Brad doesn’t even seem to care that Nate catches him in the act. He looks away again lazily and starts shooting the shit with Pappy and Kocher. 

“Do you want wing or do you want center?” Brad asks him as they line up, his eye on the other team. 

“You take center,” Nate tells him, eying Encino Man on the other half of the field. Brad follows his gaze. Nate tells him, “I want to win.” 

Brad nods. 

Encino Man’s side has two of his cronies and Poke, Pappy, Kocher, Trombley—who eerily gives the impression of Norman Bates—and a few other kids with names Nate didn’t catch. They have the second string goalie, Walt, Stafford, Christeson, Garza, Bryan, and Teren Holsey. 

They play a good game. Encino Man’s a dick, but he’s an awesome center mid. They score on the second stringer twice in the first fifteen minutes.

“We gotta work together,” Nate says to the team as they’re dribbling the ball back up the field for kick off. “We’re not letting any more balls through. Lock down at the half.” 

They score once straight off and then again on a corner that Nate takes and Brad heads in as economical and perfect as a machine. Brad nudges him with one sweaty shoulder as they make their way back to the half. 

“You’re alright,” he says. 

Nate turns his head to look at him. “You too,” he says after a moment. 

Sometime around then the varsity girl’s team finishes their tryouts and comes to watch them. Encino man’s side gets all distracted, and Nate accepts an elegant pass from Walt that he nudges off to Brad just inside the penalty box. He hammers it into the net so hard it bounces out again. 

“Not bad,” Coach calls out. “Bring it in, guys.” 

He explains that the roster will be posted next Monday, that those who don't make Varsity will be playing for JV, that he expects them all to get plenty of sleep because their first game is in two weeks, and that he’ll see them in a few days. Nate collects his stuff and doesn’t bother to shower, just changes his cleats for a beat up pair of Nikes. He’s supposed to meet Julia to walk her home as soon as he’s done with practice and he just knows she’ll be sulky and sour by the time he finally shows up to claim her.

Waiting until Monday is an agony. He spends a lot of time taking runs around the neighborhood, and by the end of the week he's firmly mapped out the rugged terrain of driveways, manicured lawns, and hedges made up of scraggly agapanthus. Mike's assimilated him into his group without Nate doing very much about it, not that Nate minds, because they're laidback and funny. Also Brad’s skinny friend Ray turns out to be in four of his classes, and while he’s a complete fucking psycho and exasperates all of their teachers, he’s also really smart. 

When Monday finally rolls around he leaves his sister behind and arrives at school fifteen minutes early. The notice is already tacked up by the time he gets there and a crowd of guys standing in front of it. Schwetje breaks away from the pack looking frustrated. He slams into Nate’s shoulder as he walks by. 

“What the hell’s your problem?” Nate asks, startled into anger. Schwetje just keeps walking. He shakes his head and goes to look at the sheet. 

**Varsity Team Roster**  
 _First String_  
1\. Timothy Bryan, Right Mid  
2\. Brad Colbert, Striker  
3\. Antonio Espera, Keeper  
4\. Nate Fick, Left Wing  
5\. Walt Hasser, Right D  
6\. Teren Holsey, Stopper  
7\. Eric Kocher, Sweeper  
8\. Jason Lilley, Left D  
9\. Sean Patrick, Right Wing  
10\. Craig Schwetje, Center Mid  
11\. Evan Stafford, Left Mid

 _Second String_  
1\. Anthony Jacks, Keeper  
2\. James Chaffin  
3\. John Christeson  
4\. Gabe Garza  
5\. Hector Leon  
6\. Michael Stinetorf  
7\. James Trombley

Nate’s name is highlighted and there’s a big C written on the same line. He blinks at it. “Looks like you made Captain,” Brad says, over his shoulder. 

Nate stares at it blankly. “I’m not sure I understand.” 

Brad shrugs. “Don’t fuck up.”

*

“I’m going to tell Mom I can walk to school on my own from now on,” Julia says as they reach the campus the next day. 

“Please do, I’m getting tired of waiting for you to finish primping every morning.” 

“I do not primp!”

Nate snorts. He passes Brad on the way to Calc and Brad lifts his chin in acknowledgement. 

“Holy! Nate!” Julia says, grabbing his arm after Brad passes. “You know Brad Colbert?” 

Nate shrugs her off. “Yeah? He’s on the team with me.” He shoots her a look. “Lemme guess, you’re coming to every one of my games now?” 

“Shut up. I’m not that bad.” 

“Uhuh,”Nate replies. “I’ll see you later. You’re at least walking home on your own, because I’ve got practice.” 

“As if I could miss you lugging that gigantic gym bag around,” she mutters.

*

That day, after practice and showers, he runs into Brad outside the locker room. He's leaning against the wall talking to two seniors, but when his eyes meet Nate's he straightens up. 

"You walking home?" 

"Yeah," Nate says shortly, heading to the parking lot. Between Encino Man's ass shattery and coach's conditioning regimen, Nate is too tired for this shit. 

"Want a ride?" Brad calls after him. 

Nate turns and pauses. "Yeah, why not." 

Brad smiles. "See you later," he says to the girls, hoisting his gym bag off the ground. 

"My sister has a crush on you," Nate tells him in the car. 

"Oh dick move," Brad says with a laugh, fiddling with the radio. "She's a frosh, right?" 

"How do you know?" Nate asks, lifting a brow at him. 

Brad settles on a station and then replies, "She has the same earnest green eyes and baby face you do, hard to miss." 

Nate snorts. "Just tell me you have a girlfriend, or a fuck buddy, or a weird sadomasochistic relationship with Ray Person--anything I can go back to her with so that she won't be bugging me about you." 

Brad is affronted. "Relationship with Ray? Fuck you very much too." 

Nate just laughs. 

"You're out of luck, I'm afraid. No girlfriend, and I am on the market for some tight virgin pussy." 

"Dude, she's still my sister," Nate says, leveling a look at him. 

They're stopped at a light and Brad meets his eyes. "Oh, I meant you." 

Brad smiles at Nate's indignant squawk and hits the accelerator a few seconds before the light actually turns green. Nate doesn't know what's wrong with him. The comment was innocuous enough. Certainly not intended to make Nate think about it. But he's thinking about it. He clears his throat and looks purposefully away from Brad's hands on the steering wheel. He doesn't quite miss the subtle way Brad's lips quirk, as if he's fighting a smile.


End file.
